1 Compliance Statement
DCA Overview
Introduction
The Diameter Control Agent (DCA) is an interface used by Prepaid Charging to allow processing of Diameter based billing requests utilizing existing Oracle SLC and Charging infrastructure.
The Diameter base protocol is defined by RFC 6733, and extended to include real-time credit-control messages by RFC 4006.
In addition, the Diameter protocol defined by RFC 4006 is further extended by GPP TS 32.299 V11.3.0 Diameter charging applications.
DCA Coverage
The DCA (and thus this document) only covers the use of Prepaid Charging as a Diameter Credit Control server. For information about Prepaid Charging acting as a Diameter Credit Control Client, see the Diameter Charging Driver (DCD) documentation.
DCA Server
The DCA server runs on the SLC SLEE, taking inbound requests from Diameter Credit-Control clients and passing them to Prepaid Charging for further processing. This may involve passing the request on to an existing billing engine using a different protocol such as FOX, OSA or Diameter.
The DCA server maintains the connections to the Diameter Credit-Control client (or, if configured, intermediate Diameter peer, such as a proxy).
General restrictions
Specific adherence to the RFCs is described in a later section, but there are some general properties of Diameter that are not handled by the DCA.
These are:
- TLS (RFC 2246) is not supported.
- Authentication and Authorization messages are not supported
- Dynamic peer discovery is not performed.
- SNMP client alarm generation (SMS alarm mechanism is used instead)
- There is no expectation to provide Network Access Services (NAS) server functionality as part of the Oracle Diameter implementation. Note that this does not prohibit existing Diameter based NAS servers acting as Diameter Credit Control clients, for the purposes of billing a service.